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"Ten years," she breathes, pulling back an inch, furious and glowing, her thumb tracing my jaw like she's checking the material. "You absolute filing cabinet. Ten YEARS. Do you know what I could've — we could've been doing THIS since I was twenty-five⁠—"

"You'd have hated me at twenty-five. I was worse."

"Worse HOW, you laminated⁠—"

"More compliant." I kiss the corner of her mouth, her jaw, the pulse going under her ear. "Less sure. I'd have asked Wes's permission and ruined all three of us. This version—" her breath catches as my teeth find her earlobe, "—this version knows exactly what he's risking, and he's doing it anyway. That's the confession. Take it or leave it."

"Taking it. Obviously. Taking it forever, keep — yes, that—" and then, muffled, indignant, against my mouth: "You cited my BUNTING⁠—"

"Sloane." My forehead against hers, both of us breathing like the ridge run. "I need you to know what you're — your brother. The assessment. If this happens, I can't undo⁠—"

"Brady." She takes my face in both hands, wax-stained fingers on my jaw, and looks at me with those eyes that have been setting fires in my chest since before I knew the terminology. "I have never once in my life wanted to undo the thing I fought for. Now stop assessing me and kiss me like the report's already filed."

So I do.

The second kiss has nothing soft in it. It's teeth and ten years of interest, and she gives it back with the same relentlessness she aims at fire codes, and when I lift her onto the workbench she wraps her legs around me and pulls me in like a closing argument. The pencil goes; her hair comes down around my hands, smelling of vanilla and smoke, and I get to be the thing that undoes it.

"This bench rated for this?" she gasps, as my mouth finds her jaw, her throat, the spot that makes her whole body arc.

"I built worse assumptions into the load calc."

"God, keep talking like that⁠—"

Her apron hits the floor. My jacket follows it. Her hands work my shirt buttons with a focus I've only seen her give wick placement, and when she flattens her palms against my chest she exhales like something's finally been verified. I peel her sweater over her head and have to stop — just stop — because she's sitting in the lamplight in a plain cotton bra with wax on her collarbone, and every long-suppressed inventory I own comes due at once.

"You're staring," she says, going pink.

"Ten years of backlog. Let me work."

I work. I map her like a scene — slow, thorough, no detail unlogged: the line of her collarbone under my mouth, the catch in her breath when my thumb crosses her nipple through the cotton, the impatient noise she makes when I take too long with the clasp, and the much better noise when I don't anymore. She's soft and warm and arching into my hands, fingers buried in my hair, and when I bend my head and take her breast in my mouth she says my name at a volume that startles the hayloft.

"Sensitive," I note, against her skin.

"Shut up. No, don't — don't shut up, do the load-calc voice⁠—"

Her jeans, my belt, her hands everywhere, greedy and certain. When she palms me through the denim I have to brace a hand on the bench, and she grins against my mouth, delighted, powerful, terrible. "Oh, there it is," she murmurs. "The famous Callahan focus."

"You're a hazard."

"Cite me."

I get her jeans down her legs and my hand between her thighs and citation becomes a lost science. She's soaked — soaked through the cotton, soaked when I push it aside and slide two fingers along her, and she groans when I finally touch her bare, two weeks of coffee handoffs and paint pens in that sound. I learn her there the way I've learned everything else about her, patiently, obsessively — the slow circles on her clit that make her thighs shake, the stroke inside her that makes her swear — reading what makes her breath stutter and doing it again, and again, until she's gripping my shoulder with her nails and riding my fingers and telling me exactly, bossily, gorgeously, what she needs.

"There — right there, don't you dare get interrupted⁠—"

The phone is in my jacket. On the floor. If Channel 1031 goes off right now I will throw it into the melter and file the claim myself.

"Look at me," I say, because she's thrown her head back, and she drags her eyes open, glazed and furious at how good it is, and holds my gaze while I work her — two fingers deep inside her, curling, my thumb tight on her clit, her whole body winding like a wick — and watching Sloane Mercer let herself be watched is the single most explicit thing that has ever happened to me, and I've been to Atlantic City.

She comes with my name in her mouth and her heel dug into the back of my thigh, clenching hard around my fingers, shaking, and I hold her through it like the piano I've been waiting under a ladder to catch for two weeks. And before the aftershocks are done she's pulling my belt free with intent that cannot be misread, shoving denim off my hips, wrapping her fist around my cock with a hum of satisfaction so proprietary I feel it in my teeth.

"Well, hi," she says, stroking me slow, base to tip, thumb dragging over the head until my hips buck into her hand and the drying rack takes another hit. "No wonder you're so uptight. You've been storing it all HERE⁠—"

"Sloane — we don't have to⁠—"

"Brady Callahan." She looks up at me, flushed, wrecked, absolutely certain, condom already fished from the jeans on the floor — "my wallet, don't ask, Junie's a prepper" — and she presses it into my hand. "The report is filed. Sign your name."

The workbench is, for the record, rated for it. She pulls me in with her legs and I push into her slow — watching her face the whole way, watching her mouth drop open as she takes me, inch by inch, tight and hot and wet around my cock after ten years of never — and the sound she makes, low, undone, mine, is going in whatever part of my brain used to store the fire code, because that's clearly getting rewritten tonight.